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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27700366">Wait For Me (I'm Coming Home)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/madwriteson/pseuds/madwriteson'>madwriteson</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Wolf 359 (Radio)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/F, Mild Angst, Post canon, Waiting, brief mention of Dom/Renée, in the context of a relationship that has failed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 07:00:32</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,541</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27700366</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/madwriteson/pseuds/madwriteson</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Isabel Lovelace takes some time to remember how to be around people again, now that she's back on Earth. Renée waits. (And drags Isabel off to see musicals.)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Isabel Lovelace/Renée Minkowski</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Yuletide 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Wait For Me (I'm Coming Home)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/spiritinthespacebar/gifts">spiritinthespacebar</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Isabel always came when Renée called. Even when she was halfway across the world, even when her mind was too noisy to bear the touch of another person, even when it was something as silly as “I really need to get out of this apartment, want to go do something with me?” Whatever it was, Isabel would drop what she was doing and go to Renée, and she knew why, and she knew it was helpless, but she would go anyway. Because her friend needed her.</p><p>This was the first time the something had been to go a musical, though. Isabel wasn’t sure about it, but Renée already had the tickets, and Dom wasn’t coming along, and Doug was off with Jacobi, the pair of them trying to find themselves, and Pryce was still buried in a Goddard Futuristics research lab, trying to do much the same. So it was just her and Renée for the first time since they’d come back to Earth, and Isabel couldn’t help but rejoice in it.</p><p>They went to see Chicago. Isabel enjoyed it more than she thought she would, though some part of her wondered if it was really Isabel Lovelace enjoying it or whatever part of her was alien. The Dear Listeners had seemed to enjoy music, after all. Maybe they’d made her appreciate it more, too.</p><p>But it wasn’t the music that stuck in her head after.</p><p>They headed out into a thick, muggy night after the end, Isabel following along in Renée’s wake, willing to let the other woman decide when to say goodbye. Making it last as long as it could, this strange passing place where they could pretend to be the way they had been, before returning home had made everything complicated.</p><p>Finally, Renée lead them to a little green space, not quite a park, and came to a halt there, her hands shoved into the pockets of her jeans. Isabel came to a halt beside her, waiting, watching Renée’s profile as she stared at a flickering sign across the way.</p><p>Renée let out a tired sigh. “It’s over.”</p><p>“Huh?”</p><p>Renée turned her head to one side and smiled at Isabel, though there was a painful twist to it, as if she was struggling to push that smile through other, stronger feelings inimical to smiling. “Me. Dom. It’s over.”</p><p>Isabel hated herself a little for the way her heart leapt in her chest. “I’m sorry.”</p><p>Renée shrugged awkwardly. “It was probably over before I left. I just… I didn’t want to admit it to myself. Wanted to tell myself that I’d come back, and he wouldn’t still be angry with me, and we’d somehow… work it out.” She sighed again. “And maybe we would have, if I’d come back the same Renée Minkowski who left.”</p><p>But none of them had come back to Earth the way they’d left it, if they’d even come from Earth in the first place. “What are you going to do now?”</p><p>Another of those sideways looks. “Goddard’s hush money is good enough to buy me a house about anywhere I’d care to live, so I thought I’d start there. And…” Renée’s gaze darted away and back towards her, awkward and earnest. “I was wondering…”</p><p>“Don’t.” The word came out harsher than Isabel had intended it.</p><p>“Oh. I… sure.” </p><p>The air between them was thick with awkwardness now, and Isabel rushed to break it. “It’s not you. It’s me.”</p><p>“Like that isn’t the oldest one in the book.” But Renée’s voice wasn’t even cold as she said the words. There was just… nothing  in it. “I guess we should probably say good—“</p><p>“Goddamnit, Renée!” Isabel grabbed the other woman’s arm as she started to move away. “It’s not like that. You know it isn’t. I just… I can’t right now. I just can’t.” She took a deep breath. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to. If you’re willing to wait for me.”</p><p>Renée took a deep breath of her own and turned back towards Isabel, studying her face. “And if I don’t wait?”</p><p>Isabel met her eye. “I’ll still always come when you call. That’ll never change.”</p><p>Renée nodded. “Okay.”</p><p>After that, they went and found a café that was still open, sat over a pot of decaf and stale scones, talked about nothing in particular until the café closed and kicked them both out. But Isabel’s almost-promise strung the air between them, bright and shining, a connection she couldn’t ignore.</p><p> </p><p>Goddard had paid everyone who had returned on the Urania enough that that they could probably get away with never working again, if they didn’t want to. </p><p>So Isabel didn’t.</p><p>She didn’t stay in one place long enough to hold down a job, anyway. She’d purchased a motorcycle—she, or at least the Isabel Lovelace who had once been, had always wanted to learn how to ride a motorcycle—and she’d headed off wherever the wind took her, taking each day as it came, spending her nights in motels and eating her meals in roadside diners. On days when the weather was too bad to ride, she would flop back on the bed of whatever po-dunk little establishment she found herself in, would turn on the inevitable clock radio all these rooms always seemed to have, and would listen to whatever channel it was tuned to, letting herself sink into the flow of music and the patter of the radio personalities. </p><p>She suspected that what she was doing wasn’t exactly healthy. But it felt nice to be free of expectations for a time, to not have to stick to a schedule, to only make decisions that affected herself. It had been hard to do, at first—she had been in crisis mode for so long, and even if the original Isabel Lovelace’s memories weren’t actually hers, they still affected her—but she was learning how to live like a normal person again, one hard-fought day at a time.</p><p>Still woke up in the middle of the night some nights, sweating and screaming from the nightmares, but she would take what she could get.</p><p> </p><p>The musicals became a habit, after a little while. If Isabel hadn’t checked in for a couple of months, she could always rely on Renée to call her up on her basic cell phone—one she only had so that Renée could call—with a request that Isabel come see a musical with her. </p><p>Sometimes the others were there, and it was good to catch up. They would eat meals together that almost made them feel like a family, everyone talking cautiously around the shared traumas that were still a very recent past, and just as cautiously optimistic about their futures.</p><p>But when the two of them were alone, Renée never returned to that conversation they had almost had that first time she had asked Isabel to come back to her, and Isabel still didn’t have the words to return to it herself. She wondered, sometimes, if she would ever heal enough—if she would ever be human enough—to accept what Renée still seemed to be willing to offer her.</p><p>She would try.</p><p> </p><p>The almost that hung between them became an actuality, after a while. Renée seemed to have accepted that Isabel would always leave after a little while, but that she would always come back, too. So one night after they’d gone to see yet another of the musicals Renée kept dragging her to—Pirates of Penzance, Isabel’s memory told her, though she didn’t remember much of the musical itself—they sat down together on Renée’s couch with a bottle of wine and talked halfway through the night.</p><p>Only it hadn’t just been talking, had it? It had been Renée’s arm around her shoulders, warm and muscular, the soft press of her lips to Isabel’s temple, the awkward kisses that had deepened into desperation. And then it had become clothing discarded a piece at a time and then shed the rest of the way at speed, a desperate conflagration of bare skin on skin that left them both panting and exhausted after.</p><p>Isabel actually tried to stay that time. </p><p>She only managed a week.</p><p>Renée’s only goodbye was an understanding nod as Isabel swung her leg over her motorcycle and tried to convince herself that she was just going on a quick joyride.</p><p>But she would be back.</p><p>They both knew it now.</p><p> </p><p>Another year went by. Isabel found that she had settled into a routine, now. Not one so rigid it couldn’t handle disruptions or allow for sudden fancies, but one that meant she found her way to the house Renée had purchased in upstate New York a few times a year, just by happenstance. One that meant that sometimes, she stayed for weeks, when more than a night or two had once been too painful to bear.</p><p>And as Isabel started to become a creature of habit, Renée started to make a game of getting Broadway tickets that were impossible to get, timing them for the weeks that Isabel was most likely to show up. Four months ago, it had been Hamilton. </p><p>Tonight, it was Hadestown.</p><p>“What’s this one about, again?”</p><p>“Orpheus and Eurydice.” At Isabel’s blank look, Renée raised her eyebrows. “Oh, come on, you can’t tell me that your high school didn’t do that whole mandatory section on Greek myths.”</p><p>“Must’ve missed it,” Isabel said with a shrug. “Military brat, remember? I had two years of Arthurian legends and went over Hamlet three times. I could do those worksheets in my sleep by the third one.” And, with a jolt, she realized that had been the first time she had referred to the past of the old Isabel Lovelace without putting herself at the mental distance of being the new one. “Tell me about it?” she asked, trying to cover her discomfort with that sudden revelation.</p><p>“Orpheus was a musician, and Eurydice was his wife. But Eurydice died, so he decided to go into Hades—“</p><p>“I thought that was the god of death?”</p><p>“It’s the name of the place, too. And Orpheus decides to go bring Eurydice back, and he sings a song for Hades—yes, the god this time—and his wife Persephone that’s so beautiful that they let him take Eurydice back with him, on one condition—he has to walk ahead of her all the way back to the real world, and can’t look back to make sure she’s following him until they reach their destination. But he turns around too soon, before she’s crossed the threshold, so she has to go back to Hades and he has to continue without her.”</p><p>“That’s… sad.”</p><p>“Anyway, this is sort of a…” Renée considered. “Early 20th century mash-up sort of thing? Depression-era, I think. I’ve listened to the soundtrack a few times, it’s pretty good.”</p><p>Isabel smiled. “I figured it had to be, if we were going to see it. You know I’m not exactly a musical connoisseur, so this probably doesn’t mean much coming from me, but you have good taste.”</p><p>Renée blushed.</p><p>The set was smaller than Isabel had expected for something that sounded as epic as what Renée had described to her, and their seats were closer to the stage than what Renée usually managed to get. Isabel decided to hold her judgement on whether or not that was a good thing until the show was over.</p><p>The seats and the size of the stage made the entire thing an intimate experience. By the time the the first basso-profundo notes sung by the actor playing Hades hit them, she had decided that seats this close were definitely worth it. She could feel that voice in her bones. She leaned close to Renée, pressing against her shoulder to shoulder in order to whisper in her ear. “I don’t do men, but…”</p><p>“That voice, right?” came Renée’s amused murmur in response.</p><p>“Yeah.”</p><p>At the end of the second act, Renée got restless. No, not restless, but… something changed, and Isabel found herself looking towards Renée again and again, trying to figure out what it was.</p><p>Somewhere in the middle of Orpheus and Eurydice’s journey back out of hell, Isabel realized that Renée had tears pouring down her cheeks. She made a small sound and reached for her, but Renée shrugged Isabel’s hand off her shoulder and dug a packet of tissues out of her bag. </p><p>“After,” she said quietly as she dabbed the tears away.</p><p>Isabel waited.</p><p>It was like the first time, after. Walking out into a humid evening, Isabel following Renée. Or at least at first, but when Renée held a hand out behind her, Isabel took it and fell into step at her side.</p><p>“Want to go see Central Park?” Renée asked.</p><p>“Sure.” Isabel wanted to talk, wanted to know what it had been about that song that had made Renée react the way she had, but even now, Renée was the queen of stubbornness and would only talk in her own time.</p><p>Eventually, they were among green trees and lampposts, but Renée still didn’t say anything.</p><p>So Isabel did. “You want to talk about it?”</p><p>Renée’s jaw stiffened and the corner of her mouth twitched down into a frown. “Just thinking. About how… I don’t blame him, but… and I thought I was over it, you know?”</p><p>Isabel understood this disjointed speech all too well. Renée had told Isabel again and again that it didn’t bother her that Dom hadn’t waited, that she didn’t blame him for moving on from their relationship—and how could she, when Goddard had been so quick on the draw with everyone’s death certificates that Renée had technically been dead for more than a year when they’d arrived home?—but Isabel knew that brains didn’t always work in straightforward, logical ways. Not even when Renée had known what waited for her, not even when she had had time to come to terms with it on their trip back to Earth.</p><p>“You don’t have to be over it,” Isabel said, squeezing her hand tight. “And…”</p><p>Renée gave her a bleak look. “And?”</p><p>“And…” Isabel paused and tried to find an elegant way to put it, but the broken stumbling words forced their way out of her mouth anyway. “And you’ve… you waited for me. Maybe it doesn’t matter that he didn’t wait for you, because you waited for me, even when I left again and again, you waited, and you turned yourself into home, and god, Renée…”</p><p>They had slowed to a halt by then, Renée half-turned towards Isabel to study her face, a frown making a little crease between her brows. “I… I’m not sure what you’re trying to say there,” she finally said into the silence between them, almost sounding amused. “Am I Orpheus or Eurydice in this story?”</p><p>Isabel laughed, even as tears started streaming down her face. “Neither. You’re Renée Minkowski, and I’m ready to have a home again, as long as it’s with you. You waited. I’m coming home.”</p><p>Renée’s face in that moment was the most beautiful thing Isabel had ever seen.</p><p>And the kiss that came after… well, beautiful was too tepid a word to describe it.</p>
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